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Religion
has become an impersonal affair, an institutional loyalty.
It
survives on the level of activities rather than
in the stillness of
commitment. -Abraham
Joshua Heschel
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The only struggle which religions can
justify, the only struggle worthy of humans,
is the moral
struggle against humanity's own disordered passions,
against
every kind of selfishness, against attempts to oppress
others,
against every type of hatred and violence.
-Pope John Paul II
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| Love
and kindness are the basis of my religious beliefs.
The
rituals and outward signs are not as important as
one's
actions and deeds. Religion should be a path to God,
not
something to fight about. -Bernie Siegel |
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This is what I found
out about religion: it gives you courage
to make the
decisions you must make in a crisis and the confidence
to
leave the results to a higher Power. Only by trust in God
can a person carrying responsibility find repose.
-Dwight
D. Eisenhower
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| No person has a right to lead such a life of contemplation as
to forget
in one's own ease the service due one's neighbor;
nor has any person
a right to be so immersed in active life
as to neglect the contemplation of God.
-St. Augustine |
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| I would rather live in a world where
my life is surrounded by mystery
than live in a world so
small that my mind could comprehend it.
-Harry Emerson Fosdick |
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I also see the world of religion.
I see some
of my brothers and sisters trying to
be
religious without being fully human.
They seem a little
rigid and narrow at
times, wanting to be holy, but not
human.
They seem to be winning a place in heaven, without
realizing or enjoying the beauty
of earth. They keep the
ten commandments,
but their observances look so joyless.
Such a world seems small
and the air in that world is
stale. -John Powell, S.J. |
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| I believe
in God as I believe in my friends, because I feel the
breath of His affections,
feel His invisible hand,
drawing me, leading me, grasping me; because I possess
an
inner consciousness of a particular Providence and of a
universal mind
that marks out for me the course of my own
destiny. -Miguel de Unamuno |
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| During the past thirty
years, people from all civilized countries on the earth
have consulted me. Among all my patients in the second
half of life--
that is to say, over thirty-five--there has
not been one whose problem
in the last resort was not
that of finding a religious outlook on life.
It is safe
to say that every one of them fell ill because he or she had
lost that which
the living religions of every age have
given to their followers, and none of them
has been
really healed who did not regain his or her religious outlook.
-Carl Jung |
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| Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever
things are honest,
whatsoever things are just, whatsoever
things are pure,
whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever
things are of good report;
if there be any virtue, and if
there be any praise, think on these things.
-The Bible |
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| People
will wrangle for religion, write for it,
fight for it,
die for it; anything but live for it.
-Charles Caleb Colton |
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God is alive in
flowers and snowflakes, in sunsets and rainbows,
in the
flash of lightning and the crash of thunder, in the calm
in the eye of the hurricane. Wherever there is life there
is God.
God is not far off on a throne in the sky;
He is alive today
in all men who walk the earth. He is
the life that surrounds
and penetrates us here and now. God is alive in people. . . .
God is not a static image; He lives in
everything and everyone.
He is in the flight of an eagle
and in the writing of a sonnet.
He is everywhere. He is
in the farthest star and the newborn baby.
He will
survive the denial of men and the blast of nuclear
destruction.
Let us affirm the invincibility of God--for
God is life eternal. -Wilferd
A. Peterson |
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| The
essential thing to know about God is that God is Good. All the rest is secondary.
-Simone
Weil |
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| True religion is the life
we live, not the creed we profess.
-J.F.
Wright |
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| The
heart of Religion is not an opinion about God,
such as philosophy
might reach as the conclusion
of an argument; it is a personal relationship with God.
-William
Temple |
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| We have been looking
for the burning bush, the parting of the sea,
the
bellowing voice from heaven. Instead we should be looking
at the ordinary day-by day events in our lives for
evidence of the miraculous. -M.
Scott Peck |
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| Religion
is never devoid of emotion, any more than love is.
It is
not a defect of religion, but rather its glory,
that it
speaks always the language of feeling. -Elton Trueblood |
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Religion is
more like a response to a friend
than it is like obedience to an expert.
-Austin Farrer |
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I think many of the
troubles we run into are due to our treating the sacred
as something abstract. This attitude is part of
what allows us to do great harm
to nature and ourselves.
If our religion is completely ethereal, we may
become numb
to the consequences of, for example, building
a chemical plant that could be toxic
to children in the
community. Not only that, but restricting religion
to a high-in-the-sky
place tends to make people polemical
about their own moral positions--to the degree
that they
can justify harming others who disagree with them. We've
seen this
phenomenon take place in country after country.
I think we would be able to live
in this world more
peaceably if our spirituality were to come from looking
not just
into infinity but very closely at the world
around us--and appreciating its depth and divinity.
-Thomas Moore
(contemporary) |
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Religion
2
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The enduring value of
religion is in its challenge
to aspiration and hope in
the mind of people. -Ernest Martin Hopkins |
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Religious
faith is not a
storm
cellar to which men
and women
can
flee
for
refuge from the
storms
of life. It is, instead,
an
inner spiritual strength
which
enables them to face
those storms
with hope
and serenity.
Religious
faith has
the miraculous
power
to lift ordinary
human beings
to
greatness
in seasons of stress. -Sam J. Ervin, Jr. |
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If I
should go out of church whenever I hear a false sentiment
I could never stay there five minutes. But why come
out?
The street is as false as the church.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson |
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Religion
is to be used as a stepping stone
to God but it must never be used as a tower
to hold one aloft from others. We are all cells
in the body of humanity. When anyone
attempts to isolate another, they
only isolate themselves more.
-Peace
Pilgrim |
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Many people conceive of
religion as something apart from
everyday affairs of the world. They think of it in terms of
ceremony or ritual or sermons and often it strikes them as
being dull or not particularly interesting. Religion may be
described in many ways. I like to think of it as a
medicine,
a healing medicine for the mind. -Norman Vincent Peale |
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There
are many religions seeking to bring comfort and happiness to humanity,
just as there are many treatments for a particular disease. All
religions
endeavor to help living beings avoid misery and find happiness.
Although we
may prefer one religious perspective to another, there is a much
stronger
case for unity, stemming from common desires of the human heart.
Each religion works to lessen suffering and contribute to the world;
conversion is not the point. I do not think about converting
others to Buddhism
or merely furthering the Buddhist cause. Instead, I try to think
of how I
as a Buddhist can contribute to the happiness of all living beings.
-unattributed |
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A
religious person is one who holds God and people in
one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm
done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion,
whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.
-Abraham
Joshua Heschel |
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Religion is not an end in itself.
One's union with God is the ultimate goal.
-Peace
Pilgrim |
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Religions become corrupted
when leaders are assigned to explain God's will to people instead
of showing them how to find this direction within
themselves. -James Redfield |
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Religion in its true sense is
the most joyous thing the human soul can know, and when the real
religion is realized, we will find it to be an agent of peace, of
joy, and of happiness, and never an agent of gloomy, long-faced
sadness.
-Ralph
Waldo Trine |
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Let your religion be less of a theory and
more of a love affair. -G.K. Chesterton |
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Working with
children on the writing of poetry has led me to ponder the ways
that most of us become exiled from the certainties of childhood;
how it is that the things we most treasure when we're young are
exactly those things we come to spurn as teenagers and young
adults. Very small children are often conscious of God, for
example, in ways that adults seldom are. They sing to God,
they talk to God, they recognize divine presence in the world
around them. . . . Yet these budding theologians often despise
church by the time they're in eighth grade.
In a similar way, the children who un-selfconsciously
make up songs and poems when they're young--I once observed a
three-year-old singing a passionate ode to the colorful vegetables
in a supermarket--quickly come to regard poetry as meaningless and
irrelevant. . . . I wonder if children don't begin to reject both
poetry and religion for similar reasons, because the way both are
taught takes the life out of them. If we teach children when
they're young to reject their epiphanies, then it's no wonder that
we end up with so many adults who are poetically and theologically
illiterate. -Kathleen Norris, The
Cloister Walk |
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We have just enough religion
to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one
another. -Jonathan Edwards |
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Depending on the use
to which it is put, religion can be a demonic force.
Religion should bring us together, but it is exploited by some to
create greater schisms among us. Nothing could be more
unfortunate. Religion must always be for the people.
People do not exist for the sake of religion. This must be
the fundamental guideline of religion in the twenty-first
century. -
Daisaku Ikeda,
Buddhism
Day by Day |
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